B. Mark Smith

A professional stock trader with two decades of practical experience traces the evolution of popular theories of stock market behavior, showing how tey have become widely accepted over time and clarifies some of the theories.

The stock market is central to the global economy. Tens of millions of people look to it to provide for a comfortable retirement. Central bankers watch it closely as they set monetary policy. Businesses around the world are forced to adjust the way they operate to meet the demands of equity investors. Yet very little has been written about how the modern global stock market came to be. In A History of the Global Stock Market, B. Mark Smith weaves an entertaining tale that ranges from medieval trading companies and nineteenth-century robber barons to modern theorists and international speculators. Here, Smith debunks the popular myth that the market is inevitably subject to recurring speculative bubbles and discredits the notion that the current "globalization" of the market is something radically different from what has occurred in the past.Informative, entertaining, and written for specialists and non-specialists alike, A History of the Global Stock Market is a worthy read for anyone who wants to understand the role of the stock market in the global economy.

An Expert Chronicle of the Market’s Ever-Growing Role WorldwideThe modern stock market, B. Mark Smith’s new book makes clear, is only one component of a much broader “equity culture”—a lively and complex international market involving stocks, bonds, mutual funds; joint stock and limited liability corporations; and trading in grain, gold, diamonds, and currency.The Equity Culture is the story of how that market came about—from shipping magnates banding together in eighteenth-century India to the railroad robber barons of nineteenth-century America to currency traders such as George Soros. Smith’s spirited and colorful telling makes two points especially that the equity culture has always been international, with globalization as merely its current phase; and that the equity culture is often surprisingly self-adjusting, with “manias, panics, and crashes” making possible ever greater risk and innovation.

History of Global Stock Market (04) by Smith, B Mark [Paperback (2004)]